Senator Jim Banks of Indiana has introduced a new piece of legislation aimed at keeping children off adult websites. The Safety and Age Filtering Enforcement (SAFE) for Kids Act would force commercial pornography platforms to verify the ages of their users before letting them in.
Protecting Children from Harmful Content
The goal of the legislation is straightforward: to prevent kids from being exposed to pornography with just a few clicks. According to Senator Banks, "Kids should not be exposed to pornography with just a few clicks. The SAFE for Kids Act helps parents protect their children and bring commonsense safeguards nationwide."
The bill specifically targets websites where more than a third of the content is sexually explicit and considered harmful to minors. Under the proposed law, these companies would have to set up reliable age verification systems, asking for a government-issued ID or using other forms of public and private digital data to prove a user is at least 18 years old.
A broad coalition of organizations, including the American Principles Project, the Institute for Family Studies, the National Decency Coalition, and Concerned Women for America, is already backing the effort. Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage Action, strongly voiced his support for the legislation, calling on Congress to act immediately.
"No more excuses. While Washington drags its feet, kids across the nation are being exposed to vile, pornographic images and ads with no meaningful safeguards to prevent it," Roberts said. He noted that parents deserve laws that give them the power to protect their families, adding that the SAFE for Kids Act will "finally hold individuals and companies liable if they fail to implement meaningful safeguards."
Statistics Driving the Push
Chip Wyatt, the government relations director for Heritage Action, pointed to the statistics driving this push. He noted that nearly 80 percent of underage children have seen adult content online at some point. "When nearly 80% of underage children have been exposed to adult content online, commonsense policies like the SAFE for Kids Act deserve strong support," Wyatt said.
Research indicates that children are running into explicit material at younger ages than in previous generations. The average age for a first exposure is now around 12, and about 60 percent of those exposures happen completely by accident.
While this is a new push at the federal level, similar laws are already active across the country. More than 25 states have already enacted their own age verification requirements for pornography websites. The Supreme Court recently upheld these state-level laws in the case of Free Speech Coalition vs. Paxton, ruling that the government does have a valid interest in protecting children from finding sexual material on the internet.
Original reporting: Tampa Free Press — read the source article.
